NCSA Director, Thom Dunning

Thom Dunning is the director of the Institute for Advanced Computing Applications and Technologies and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also holds an endowed position as Distinguished Chair for Research Excellence in Chemistry and professor in the Department of Chemistry.

As leader of IACAT/NCSA, Dunning leads a staff of approximately 300 technologists and scientists who:

• provide and support high-performance computing, data-intensive computing, and networking resources;
• explore innovative computing architectures and techniques to achieve petascale (and beyond) science;
• develop cyberenvironments tailored to the needs of research communities and software and tools to improve cybersecurity;
• create artful visualizations of scientific phenomena;
• and help prepare the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Dunning previously held leadership positions at the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at the University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the University of North Carolina System, the Office of Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and Los Alamos National Laboratory. He was instrumental in creating DOE's Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) program, the federal government's first comprehensive program aimed at developing the software infrastructure needed for leadership-class scientific computing.

He is a fellow of the American Physical Society and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science as well as a member of the American Chemical Society. Dunning received DOE's E. O. Lawrence Award in 1997 and its Distinguished Associate Award in 2001.

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Recent presentations

NCSA All-Staff Meeting - February 23, 2006